That is quite a revision when one considers the company reported earnings of £3.3billion last year.

When chief executive Dave Lewis talks about building a ‘new Tesco’ and re-educating the staff, starting with the supplier team, he sounds remarkably like Antony Jenkins at Barclays when he was led, blinking his eyes, into the top job after Bob Diamond was terminated.

But cultural change in large organisations does not come easy, as Jenkins has found.

Lewis’s task in changing direction at Tesco potentially could be eased by the scale of top management exits. After Sir Terry Leahy left, the hapless Phil Clarke dispensed with the services of many of the previous top team and brought in his own loyalists.

Unfortunately, many of these have vanished too – with eight suspended, four of whom have since been fired, and a Serious Fraud Office probe hanging over their heads. One can understand why they had to go, but it does mean that many of the people who understood the essence of Tesco, going back several decades, are not there to hold Lewis’s hand.

Lewis could do worse than seek out some of that past expertise as he looks to steady a listing vessel.

Some of the missing profits can be put down to changing practices.

Tesco long had a fearsome reputation for pinning suppliers to the ground. It was over-exuberance and cheating on the numbers that was largely responsible for this year’s disasters.

We are told that 900 people who directly negotiate with suppliers have been retrained in the wake of the accounting scandal, which revolved around counting supplier rebates and incentives as profits before they arrived.

But, as we learned at the banks, the noise around the Libor interest rate meddling scandal did not stop another group of traders from engaging in malpractice in the foreign exchange markets as recently as 2013.

Investors won’t be told of the new direction that Lewis intends to take until January, when he plans to release his ‘strategic review’.

The easiest thing for him to do would be to slash and burn and look for easy wins, as when Phil Clarke acceded to short-term shareholders’ demands and sold off Fresh & Easy in the US.

What Lewis needs to recognise is that the real problems are in super-large Extra stores that are no longer fit for purpose in an age of more frequent shopping trips, smaller shops and increasing customer promiscuity, with Lidl, Aldi and Poundland on his turf.

Black Friday and 40in Polaroid TVs are not going to deal with the problem. Cutting prices on 1,000 items of grocery will help, and restore a bit of the ‘pile it high, sell it cheap’ philosophy.

Tesco’s biggest problem is that it may have the right portfolio in the shape of more convenience stores than its rivals, but poor service, a shabby shopping experience and a complex pricing structure has weakened its link to the consumer.

Lewis promises that his plans will pay off in the long term. But it will be a hell of a struggle in a super-competitive grocery market where everyone is fighting for an edge.

Kate’s way

Kate Swann is no Harriet Green. Her triumphs in the boardroom at WH Smith over a decade, and recently at SSP, the firm behind Upper Crust, have passed by with barely a media interview, let alone a Green-style photoshoot at a Mayfair hostelry in elegant gym kit with a kettlebell. But there is no such modesty for Swann when it comes to making money.

Almost a year after she left WH Smith’s she has picked up a £9m post-dated cheque from an unchallenging long-term incentive scheme.

Meanwhile her new employer has love-bombed her with a 1 per cent share stake worth nearly £10million, a cash bonus of £1.35million for helping with the float (wasn’t that what she was hired to do?), together with a £750,000 basic salary.

And people wonder why we are such a divided society.

Losing trust

It is not clear who had the luckier escape when Balfour Beatty snubbed a merger with rival Carillion this summer.

An investigation by the BBC’s Newsnight will have made uncomfortable viewing in the Carillion boardroom, which boasts on its website of ‘Making Tomorrow a Better Place’ and being a ‘Trusted Partner’ in construction.

Not for the Carillion sub-contractors working in hothouse conditions in Qatar with miserable accommodation, sub-standard safety conditions and low wages. Shameful.